Night-Side of Nature Or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers

What a wonderful collection of anecdotes! And what a tiresome sermon the author has chosen to embed them in! Mrs. Crowe is a hard taskmaster. She delivers great gouts of pontification on behalf of supernatural occurrences at the beginning of her book and appears unable to say enough on the subject to satisfy herself. No one is allowed to dismiss these phenomena out of hand, and anyone bold enough to express simple disbelief is allowed to do so only on the strength of a lifetime spent examining the minutiae of the accumulated lore. Furthermore, no matter how many instances of such occurrences one may debunk, the next instance may be the very one that pans out. So absence of evidence can never constitute evidence of absence. The author (writing in 1848) tells us that the people of the seventeenth century believed in everything. This gullibility inspired the people of the eighteenth century to believe nothing. She hopes that the people of the nineteenth century will be open-minded but not gullible. She indicts the scientists of her day for seizing and strangling any infant idea they did not procreate. Alas, as one peruses Mrs. Crowe's book, one cannot help seeing it for what it is, a determined attempt to prop up the standard theology of the day with a thousand eyewitness accounts of supernatural incidents. But what incidents they are! Mrs. Crowe's anecdotes read like the tales of the supernatural one might hear from one's elderly relatives. You may think what you like, but Uncle Jack saw these things himself, and by God, they're true! Mrs. Crowe seemingly canvassed all the old people and got all the stories and arranged them for us by category. And they are wonderful stories, stories of premonitory dreams, doppelgangers, astral projection, visits by wraiths, wailings by banshees, and the creation of pandemonium by poltergeists. If only she wouldn't preach so much. Dead soldiers put in one last appearance from the battlefield. Priests leave their corporeal bodies behind to minister to the spiritual needs of expiring parishioners. Dying civil servants interrupt their final journey from India to the great beyond to visit England and say goodbye to the women they almost married. Spiritual hirelings cross oceans to chat with missing relatives in pubs. And premature burials abound. My personal favorites are the stories of the gentry who walk in on their doubles who are reading in the library by the light of stolen candles. Two-thirds of the way through her text, Mrs. Crowe mercifully runs out of sermons while she is still well-stocked with anecdotes, and the book finally becomes an unalloyed pleasure to read, a collection of incredible tales related by credible persons. The bible-thumping which occasionally rendered the first part of the book tedious seems to come to an end. Or perhaps like the unfortunates who dwell in Mrs. Crowe's haunted houses, one simply learns to tune out her disruptive digressions. There is an innocence about the lady'